Every year, thousands of industry professionals descend upon the Microsoft Ignite Convention. The attendees bring opportunity for Microsoft teams like Azure to convert curious minds into active product users. Developing a familiar and user-friendly tool to handle the process of gathering, finding, and capitalizing on high quality leads is a complex series of user research, instinctual expertise and timing.

My Role — Project Lead
Art direction, UX strategy, user-centered design, testing, and implementation

Our Challenge
Our task at Indigo Slate was to help the Azure Sales Team capitalize on leads generated from the convention. Our metric for success was how many engagement opportunities we could develop.

With Ignite a mere month away, we needed to not only understand our user – the Azure Sales Team, but their users as well. Knowing how they gathered information on them, where they kept track of their leads currently, what defined a good lead, and what convention materials they were using were some of the basics.

With this we could build a categorization of touch-points for a system that allowed each salesperson the flexibility of what or when to follow-up. 

A Natural Touch
So we took to the Microsoft streets with our questionnaires and interviews. We found where our users spent their day and what their impressions of the convention experience were. We learned excel was the tool of choice for tracking and data, while convention collateral was their way to extend ‘light’ or ‘loose’ booth interactions for follow-up opportunities. 

It was in the midst of our user-discovery conversations that the puzzle started to fit together. What our Sales team needed was not more collateral or more data. They needed a way to dynamically create tailored content for their leads which in turn would provide better data. Their user’s interaction with this HUB resource would make those cold-calls a little less cold and a lot more natural. If the sales team knew their potential users spent a lot of time provisioning VMs, then their collateral should highlight it.

From the Azure Sales team’s user stories, we established our primary use cases. They required things like a ‘Microsoft login for data privacy’, a view of ‘leads in a list format’ because it was familiar to Excel, and a collateral creation section.

To manage these requirements, we needed to have a robust system which could dynamically create content and then visualize data derived from it. For this a web-based dashboard was perfect! A dashboard easily laid out information in a familiar pattern. If we built it ourselves it could easily accommodate the creation of sharable web-based collateral. It also addressed the sales team’s need for flexibility in data views and content expansion.

We spent the rest of our time working to organize the user journey, sketch, wireframe and prototype. Early iterations included longer screens and too many expandable sections. We cut these out because they did not consider the user’s need to work on a Microsoft Surface, on the go.

The final iteration utilized Azure dashboard design systems such as interface components and product family colors — things our users were wildly familiar with. We also built in the function to directly email leads, given most follow-ups occurred through Outlook.

Results
Upon delivery of the project and its launch, my contract with Indigo Slate was completed. Due to this, I do not have data detailing the business results. However, Microsoft’s overall happiness with the end result was certain, based on the fact they increased the project budget by over 200% to bring this product to life.

The Team
PM: Jim
Copywriter: Nicholas
Dev: Matt